Returning Home to The Voice of the Turtle

When I got home from the grocery store last night after work I turned on the speakers to my computer, and I was greeted by the mellifluous sound of John Fahey's "A Raga Called Pat, Part III" and "A Raga Called Pat, Part IV" from his The Voice of the Turtle (1968) album. There is something wrong with my hard drive. So I always have my computer running a program. I choose to leave my Amazon Cloud Player up. I just switch off the volume when I exit my apartment. I turn the speakers on when I return home at night.

I recently watched the documentary In Search of Blind Joe Death - The Saga of John Fahey (2013) and I was reminded of the time I was injured on the job by inhaling a powerful solvent used to remove some old bathroom tile in a condominium I was helping to renovate. I remained at home in my apartment in a state of mental impairment for one week. During this week I read a Howard Hughes biography and listened to Fahey's first album, Blind Joe Death (1959), repeatedly. What it felt like was being stoned, really stoned, and the world seemed swaddled in cotton gauze. I had no health insurance. I could not go to the doctor to be evaluated. So I just rode it out. Eventually, the stonedness evaporated. Either that or I never stopped being stoned. A fitting homage to John Fahey.